No More Codewarrior for Mac OS X

wandazulu writes "According to an announcement posted on the Carbon developer's mailing list, Metrowerks announced at AdHoc that the forthcoming release of CodeWarrior 10 will be the last for Mac OS X. This isn't surprising given that Apple is transitioning to Intel chips and Metrowerks has exited the Intel market, but it's still the end of an era. CodeWarrior literally saved Apple's bacon during the transition to PowerPC in the early 1990s by shipping the first working set of developer tools for the new platform. And since then CodeWarrior has been the main toolkit for commercial development on the Mac (especially pre-Xcode)."

Who? Oh...

[Graymalkin]

MetroWerks officially leaving the Mac development market is a move that has been a long time coming. They started up in the early 90s about the time Symantec began to lose interest in Mac development. Symantec's management got their eye on other technologies and the Mac Dev group and their products suffered from managerial disinterest. CodeWarrior swarmed the scene with a fast compiler, a good debugger, a nice GUI, and a really nice class library (PowerPlant). It wasn't long before PowerPlant had won over the lionshare of Mac development from MPW/MacApp and ThinkC/TCL. Unfortunately after they went public in 1994 they never really managed to turn a profit. They held on for quite a while because Apple subsidized them with development contracts, a huge site license, and even gave out $100 MetroMoney coupons with paid developer accounts to buy MetroWerks shwag.

Apple's subsidies were propping up MetroWerks and when Apple started looking like a losing horse they started porting their dev tools to every platform they could. They haven't really put much effort into their Mac product since the late-90s when they started their shotgun approach to product development. They basically took their IDE and debugger and ported them to every damn platform they could find. None of their ports were really planned out, they just hoped one or two would stick and pay for the rest of the company. As they moved into new markets they put their existing products essentially in maintenance mode. They were on the verge of bankruptcy when they got Motorola to buy them out in 1999. When Motorola spun off their chip division as Freescale they sent MetroWerks with it.

There was little chance of MetroWerks supporting Apple's move to Intel, they hardly support Apple on PowerPC chips. Most of what used to be MetroWerks is now Freescale supporting Freescale products. What used to be the MetroWerks of old is long gone.

Apple is smart to release their own usable IDE and give it away to anyone that wants it. It lowers the barrier of entry to Mac development to simply purchasing a Mac. If you want to write the Next Big Thing you can plunk down a few bucks for a Mac mini and sign up for a free ADC account and a couple of mailing lists. Just a few years ago the only feasible option would be to fork over a few hundred dollars to MetroWerks or suffer with a painfully outdated MPW. Apple also gets to be really flexible with their architectures as the Intel switch is showing. Symantec's decline in interest on the Mac could have doomed the PowerPC lines if MetroWerks hadn't come along when it did. What happened to Symantec is now happing to MetroWerks. Instead of waiting for someone else to rescue Mac develop efforts Apple made Project Builder good and called it Xcode.

Re:Who? Oh...

[Trillan]

Yeah, what you said. The last major improvement in Codewarrior was the ability to open multiple projects at once. I asked for a Delete Line command back with Codewarrior 7 Gold (1994-ish), Codewarrior Pro 8 still didn't have it. Anyone who didn't notice the writing on the wall years ago has been living in a happy, happy fantasy world.

Intel decision wasn't a blood oath

[fm6]

This isn't surprising given that Apple is transitioning to Intel chips and Metrowerks has exited the Intel market...

That's silly. Has Metrowerks suddenly developed an allergy to generating x86 code? I doubt it. More likely they decided that there are too many competing Windows and Linux products for them to make a profit selling to the PC market. But their OS X expertise would give them an edge in the Intel/Mac world, even if other x86 vendors decide to start offering Mac development tools. Obviously they've decided the Mac marketplace isn't important enough to justify the cost following Apple to the new architecture.